Omeros

In hill-towns, from San Fernando to Mayagüez,   the same sunrise stirred the feathered lances of cane   down the archipelago’s highways. The first breeze rattled the spears and their noise was like distant rain   marching down from the hills, like a shell at your ears.   In the cool asphalt Sundays of the Antilles Omeros is Nobel Laureate Derek Walcott’s crowning achievement. A poem in five books, of circular narrative design, titled with the Greek name for Homer, which simultaneously charts two currents of history: the visible history charted in events - the tribal losses of the American Indian, the tragedy of African enslavement - and the interior, unwritten epic fashioned from the suffering of the individual in exile. ‘Mr. Walcott's epic is a significant and timely reminder that the past is not the property of those who first created it; it always matters to all of us, no matter who we are or where we were born.’ – The New York Times